The AI Book

CHAPTER 64Welcome to the Future

By Professor Andy Pardoe¹

¹Founder, Informed.AI Group

The Evolving Technology Landscape

The fundamental principles underpinning machine learning (ML) have been well known for many decades; in fact the concept of a neural network dates back to the 1950s. Less complex artificial intelligence (AI) methods including expert systems, decision trees and rule engines have also been around for many decades, and have been used with varying success for specific problems.

However, the interest in AI and ML in the financial services sector only became mainstream quite recently, driven in part by the public successes of the more advanced techniques of deep learning that empower natural language processing (NLP) and image recognition.

The irony of the situation is that, for many use cases within financial services, the less complex techniques of AI are very capable. However, NLP, voice to text, and visual analytics are still required within the financial services sector and these require the use of deep learning models which have only been proven in the last five years or so.

It is therefore, in part, the skill of the data scientist to select the right type of ML algorithm to solve the specific task for each use case. As with most things, using the least complex solution able to solve the problem is a solid guiding principle.

While the field of AI has over 60 years of research and development under its belt, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms ...